Using Mobile Messages to Improve Student Participation in Blended Courses: A Brazilian Case Study

Studies have shown the benefits of mobile messages in education. They assist to fix the classroom lectures, help to remind study activities, and also allow the exchange of education messages among classmates. Researchers argue that more studies must be conducted to assess the extension of these benefits, and to better identify in which context mobile messaging is the best approach to be applied. In this sense, our study examined a post-graduate class consisting of 474 learners in which Short Message Service was used. The main goal was to find out if this technology would improve student participation in the course. Two groups of learners were created, control and experimental, in order to analyze the activities' fulfillment rate and the response time. The results from the data analysis showed that students who received mobile messaging outperformed significantly students from the control group. The experimental group had better results both in completion rate and response time. They were almost 20% more effective at completing their assigned activity and up to 78 hours faster than students from the control group. In addition, a questionnaire was implemented in order to evaluate participants' satisfaction with the use of SMS. Results found that most part of the students were satisfied and enjoyed the use of the mobile messages.